About Me

This blog was born on 19 April 2015 and is slowly taking shape. For some years previous to this I had a blog called Buddhist Alchemy but it got infected and died and unfortunately I didn’t have a full back-up of the content. 🙁 Silly me.

However nothing like clouds with silver linings…. I mostly think about different sorts of things these days than the sorts of things I thought and wrote about when my main occupation was leading Buddhist retreats. These days I think about

Climate Change and the Age of Stupidity we are currently enjoying. The rate of global warming we have at present is not going to effect me much. I’ll be dead. But it is going to effect billions of human beings, perhaps as much as threatening the resources we reply on to support our current human civilisation. Yes, I’m a Buddhist. No, I don’t believe in rebirth.

Scottish Independence. I’m in favour.

Politics, and there is an awful lot of it happening in UK this April and May as we try to decide who we’d like to run the country.

Civic campaigning. We got very good at that in the Independence Referendum Yes Campaign in 2014 and it hasn’t stopped. I’m involved – a bit – in

Bairns Not Bombs Scotland Against Trident missile campaign

Scotland against TTIP a particularly nasty trade agreement being foisted on us by USA though I’d have to say with the help of quite a few EU and UK politicians.

Citizens Advice Bureau where I volunteer once a week as an adviser. My husband says I’m getting more right wing since I started doing it about 18 months ago. I don’t think that’s quite right but I do understand just how complex it is to change something like the UK Benefits setup; and I do see first-hand how a few people take everything whilst giving back very little into the system. Mostly though I just see people in need of a bit of help and it’s satisfying to be able to lend a hand in that.